Tove Tuntland

Tove Tuntland is a Director of Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics (MAP) at the Genomics Research Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation (GNF) located in San Diego, Calif, USA. Her team supports discovery and development portfolios at Novartis Pharmaceuticals. Dr. Tuntland obtained a Master of Pharmacy degree from the University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway; a Ph.D. degree in pharmaceutics from the University of Washington, Seattle, Wash, USA. Her expertise in preclinical pharmacokinetics (PK), pharmacology, PK/PD modeling, drug metabolism, and ADME (administration, distribution, metabolism, and elimination) led her to a postdoctoral career in the pharmaceutical industry. In 1996 she joined the Pharmacokinetics, Dynamics and Metabolism (PDM) Department at Pfizer Global Research and Development (PGRD) in San Diego, Calif, USA, where she contributed to the discovery and development of small molecule antiviral drugs. In 2002 Dr. Tuntland transferred to GNF, part of the global Novartis Institute of Biomedical Research (NIBR), and began building a preclinical group to support in vitro and in vivo drug studies in a variety of discovery and development programs in oncology, immunology, infectious, and metabolic diseases. Her group contributed significantly to the preclinical profiling required for selection of drug candidates into the Novartis clinical pipeline in oncology (LDE225, LDK378, LGK974, and LGX818), multiple sclerosis (BAF312), and malaria (KAE609).